This annual event brings more than 50 college teams, 500 students and their mining robots from across the country, including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, to Kennedy Space Center. Since water ice is prevalent throughout the Red Planet, the Robotic Mining Competition has revised the rules and rubrics to reflect this discovery. The Competition challenge is to mine the precious icy regolith (gravel). This water ice will provide oxygen, water and fuel for future off-world colonists. The robot, designed and built by a joint UA/Shelton State CC student team at the University of Alabama and built by AU students at Auburn University, will provide a means for K-12 and CC students to relate to engineering projects. The student design teams are composed of both graduate students and undergraduates and are multidisciplinary, representing computer engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, mechanical and aerospace engineering, and physics. Both the UA and AU teams have a comprehensive outreach plan targeting K-12 students and teachers as well as current college students at both 4-year and 2-year institutions. This plan includes both on-campus and off-campus activities and involves both the design and fabrication phases of the project as well as demonstrations of completed robots from past years. The competition was held at the KSC Visitor Complex in May, 2018. ASGC is supporting the 2 AL teams. With the overall prize, UA became the only school to win the contest three times during the competitions seven-year history. Made up of students from across engineering disciplines, computer science and other areas of campus, the team of UA and Shelton State students won the contest in 2012, placed third in 2013, placed 2nd in 2014, placed 1st in 2015, 1st in 2016, 1st in 2017 and 1st in 2018. The team also finished fourth and sixth place in the first two years of the competition.